Realme the sub-brand of Oppo introduced their first brand on May, 2018 with Realme 1 smartphone and consequently they released up to 4 products this year recently Realme awarded “Most Disruptive Brand of the year award” and “Best Smartphone of the year under 20K” for RM2 pro smartphone at Exhibit Tech Awards 2018. The Realme sold over 2 million units in Diwali sale and 3 million Realme users in a short period of 6 months and became No.3 smartphone in India Market share. Now Realme comes with another product launch in earlier after the launch of Pro series, C series & Realme Series on last month, the new product Realme U series smartphone launch event held on 28th October in India and let’s find out what’s in the box,

Overview

The initial impression what we feel when holding the device is it’s looks and feels like Realme C1 and the device is very thicker having about 8mm depth and the weight is almost 168g carrying the device is not much more weight since it’s made of poly carbonate material with 13-layer laminated technology like light reflection with glass like effect and 2.5D curved rounded edges on all sides.

In the top of the device they didn’t placed anything and in the right power ON/OFF button, in the bottom micro USB port, 3.5mm headphone jack & speaker is fixed and in the left side volume keys and SIM slot is given with two nano SIM and an dedicated SD card slot option is available, the all the four sides are same as what we seen in the Realme C1 (unboxing & Review) the difference from C1 is the front selfie camera, proximity sensor, ambient light & earpiece are erected in the center of the display within the water drop notch instead of wider notch and in the back the dual camera is mounted vertically in the top left corner and the rear mounted finger print scanner is fixed at the back at the correct position to unlock the device with your fingers easily.

Display

The U1 has a 6.3inch FHD+ IPS LCD screen display with dew water drop notch at the center of the display with 19.5:9 aspect ratio and having 90.80% screen to body ratio with the resolution of 2340*1080 pixel. Experience the full HD display by playing higher end games and enjoying the movie at full resolution and reading blogs on internet, the viewing is better in all directions and using the device with the navigation gesture instead of navigation buttons feels the full view experience.

Hardware

The Realme U1 is powered by the new Mediatek Helio P70 processor manufactured at 12nm process technology the U1 is the first device to have this processor, the Helio P70 is the successor Helio P60 processor which was used in the Realme debut smartphone Realme 1. The P70 is a 64bit processor made of 8 cores CPU having 4 cores with ARM cortex A53 for energy efficient and 4* ARM cortex A73 cores for performance runs at a clock speed of up to 2.1Ghz and supported with ARM cortex Mali G72 MP3 up-to 900Mhz graphics process. In the Antutu benchmark Helio P70 runs on Realme U1 scores 14,5021 marks by beating the Redmi Note 6 Pro & Honor 8X Smartphones in terms of CPU, GPU and Memory.

Camera

Realme comes with a huge changes in the camera department the U1 has used Sony flagship sensor IMX576 25MP selfie camera in F2.0 aperture size and 1.8um pixel features 4 in 1 pixel and it has dual real camera with 13MP primary camera and 2MP depth sensor for portrait, bokeh effect also Realme U1 features AI in the processor using that lot more AI scene detection, AI photography, back light clarity and more introduced in the camera and the U1 has a support of Super slo-mo videos at 90fps in video recording and Realme tells that this slo-mo update will be received to RM2 pro devices through OTA and other devices will be in consideration.

Camera Samples

As we taken a few shots in the Realme U1 camera it has good exposure time, has a support for HDR mode that optimize the contrast and lights on the background well. The rear camera has portrait mode with good bokeh effect also, you can take photos in different lighting mode and the front camera has no portrait mode but using the AI and custom OS there is an option to blur the background and it works better. The exposure time has became fast based on the subject and the U1 camera is close enough to take the moving subjects with good details in the subject without affecting the whole picture.

Software, Memory & Battery

Realme U1 has the same setup of software what we experienced in the previous Realme devices, the U1 runs based on Android 8.1 Oreo with security patch updated on November 5, 2018 and runs in the custom Colour OS 5.2 and this device has loaded with two memory variant the one is 3GB RAM and 32GB internal memory and 4GB + 64GB variant and it’s expandable to additional memory through SD card up-to 256GB. You’ll get 49.9GB in 64GB storage out of the box and it has support of OTG. The U1 is packed with a battery support of 3500mAh battery with power saving mode. It has a standard charging support and it will take around 2hrs to complete the charge for the first time we charge out from the box, we test and explore in the review soon.

Prices & Availability

Realme increases the price of Rs.500 in Realme U1 than Realme 2 pro in the 4B + 64GB variant and its price of Rs. 14,449 and for 3GB + 32GB variant they priced for Rs. 11,999. The Realme U1 is sold through Amazon.

Overall Realme comes with this U series in mid-range Smartphones with changes in processor and selfie camera other than all other specification in the device keeps the same as Realme 2 pro & C1 combination and definitely it could be an update of RM2 pro in terms of performance and specification with slighter increases in price.